My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”

We did not fall into each other’s arms.

We did not waste one single second asking why, or how, or how could he.

There would be an ocean of time for all of that later, years of it, and I knew, in the animal part of my brain that had taken over the controls, that we did not have years.

We had minutes, and maybe not even that.

So instead of feeling, we looked.